Skwisgaar's Habit
by Spurnine
Summary: Metalocalypse fic Skwisgaar, alone, remembers his childhood, with something several degrees below fondness.


Skwisgaar Skwigelf never ate meat, or any animal product, for that matter.

It was no serious conviction, no conscious thought of his, that made him do this. Indeed, Skwisgaar's personal convictions ran the way his life did: quickly obsessed over, quickly lost, and never once mourned for their passing. It was his belief that all things should be short-lived and quick, fun while they could be, and over as soon as possible, before they had time to root and become permanent, or got any chance to grow dull. He wanted nothing of meaning, nothing to which anything of any significance was attached.

It was the reason his room was so starkly white, and so barren of any personal detail. It was the same reason he had an endless train of bedmates.

All this came up frequently, but only ever the tip of the iceberg.

One morning Skwisgaar, still high from a night spent snorting lines off the fat ass of some forty-something-year-old whore whose fake tits, he remembered, had been like grapefruit at the bottoms of stretched-out plastic bags full of peach-colored gelatin, he reached into the refrigerator, and pulled out a carton of milk. Before he realized what he was doing he popped the waxed-paper spout open and took a single careless gulp before his eyes bulged. He dropped the carton and sprinted for the nearest bathroom, shoving Murderface out of the way with a strength that completely belied his thinness.

He spent the entire morning leaned over the gleaming porcelain bowl of one of the toilets, earnestly vomiting up everything he'd ingested over what seemed like the past week.

Toki had spent the better part of the morning searching for him when he finally found Murderface in the kitchen, watching one of the house staff mopping up the impressive puddle left behind by the carton Skwisgaar had crushed with his foot as he'd run away.

"Where's Skwisgaar? What happened here?"

"He'sch in the bathroom puking up his gutsch. Must be schomething about his schtomach."

Toki had seen the old whore who'd gone to bed with Skwisgaar that night, had seen the white powder in the plastic baggie and the hungry way Skwisgaar had eyed it. Everyone had; Skwisgaar made it a point to display whatever illegal activity he was about to take part in beforehand. None of them had asked questions. The unspoken rule of the haus was that you were only supposed to care _after_ the overdose, _after_ the motorcycle accident, _after_ the diabetic coma—and then, only to a superficial degree. And you sure as hell weren't supposed to _as_k what was wrong before anything happened. They made themselves into a court of fools, mute and blind to one another's suffering until it had already taken its toll.

In the gray confines of the bathroom, Skwisgaar heaved up the umpteenth mouthful of vomit, wanting for everything in the world for it to just _stop coming_. It didn't. Between gagging and actively vomiting, he rested his head on his sweating arms, and his mind raced furiously in the viselike cage that was his skull.

How he, as a boy, had spent hours outside his mother's door—it was never locked; half the time it wasn't even closed, and he could hear her with her chosen hunk of man, could have heard them through the paper-thin walls anyway.

Always, he did not even realize, with childhood memories, this sick bluish feeling, a double hunger—starvation for affection _and_ for food.  
Serveta skwigelf could barely be bothered to remember the condoms, let alone to feed a nine-year-old boy. And so, for the most part, Skwisgaar limped around the dingy cluttered apartment, clutching at his empty belly, hungry and forgotten.

There were other occasions, when she _couldn't_ find a man, or when a man she had found left shouting after seeing Skwisgaar's eyes peering in through the crack of the open door.

At times like those, she had nothing else to divert her attention; and then, instead of becoming any sort of mother figure, she just deflated into a lifeless shadow.

She'd let her ash-blonde hair fall into a tangled rat's-nest; she'd wear the same filthy pink terrycloth bathrobe until it stank of cigarettes and after-sex; she'd forget to wash her face until the makeup faded into her skin. Her blue eyes would go completely dead, and in this state she would shuffle around their tiny apartment, naked except for her reeking bathrobe and a pair of plush slippers matted flat with wear.

And she would act like a housewife, in the hollowest sense of the word. Wordlessly and expressionlessly, she would vacuum the floor, wash the laundry, straighten the furniture. For a short time in a few weeks, sometimes in months, the apartment would be clean enough to walk two steps in, and Skwisgaar would have clean clothes and sheets.

All this almost made Skwisgaar happy. But there was his mother's dead eyes, and the last detail.

When Serveta Skwigelf was depressed, she would cook.

Serveta rarely bought fresh groceries.

Abruptly, violently, Skwisgaar heaved up another mouthful of what he was sincerely hoping, by that point, was vodka. It certainly tasted like vodka, and burned like vodka. His nose burned, as well, and when he lifted his head and touched it (avoiding looking into the toilet all the while) he saw that his fingers came away scarlet. The wet color made him gag so hard he saw stars.

That was the color the meat had been, he recalled, when she had it frying in the skillet and was prodding it listlessly with a crusty spatula. There had been small whitish chunks—fat, she muttered around her cigarette, when he asked—and he hadn't asked any further.

He remembered having sat at the rickety formica table the first time, trembling with eagerness. She'd served him up a shapeless red-brown mass of meat on one of the scarred plastic plates, tossed down a greasy fork, and turned her back on him. He'd tried to smile up into her face, had even opened his mouth to say, "Thank you, Mamma!" the way she liked him to, whenever she had money or could get her latest suitor to buy him presents. But her pouchy stained lips with their ever-present dangling cigarette were motionless, and the mouth a flat line made jagged by the cracks in her lipstick and her chapped skin.

He turned to the plateful of meat and tucked into it hungrily. He had eaten almost half the plate, swallowing mouthful after mouthful without even chewing, when something he saw something feeble and pale writhing up in a pinkish patch of meat.

It looked like a tiny white worm with a black head. Skwisgaar stared at it, both horrified and fascinated. Another one moved somewhere else. And another, and another.

Skwisgaar dropped his fork.

Next he looked again at the plate, and broke out in a cold sweat. His jaw locked; his mouth ran with scalding saliva. He couldn't swallow. He couldn't breathe.

When he threw up, she whirled on him, awakened from her sex-deprived stupor for just long enough to slap him for wasting food. The blood streamed out of his right nostril, and his right eye watered and ran to mix with the blood and the tears and blood to drip onto the sticky-slick pool of vomit on the plate.

He'd sat crying, after that, covering his eyes and trying to blot out the memory of maggots writhing in greasy meat.

But all his attempts at forgetting failed.

He felt a tendril of wet hair in the corner of his mouth and clawed it away with a shaking hand.

His whole body shook. His teeth would chatter, if he wasn't clenching his jaw so tightly. His legs twitched, his toes spasmed in his boots. His heart was racing in his chest. He wondered, dimly, if this was where the coke came into this, for the space of one second, when he made the mistake of looking down into the bowl at the milky mess he'd made. His gut rebelled again.

This time the memory was of milk, of going to a friend's house and watching with biting envy the easy way his friend's mother served them milk and gingerbread cookies. The cookies were shaped like little brown girls and boys with smiling faces and buttons drawn on in chocolate icing so dark it was nearly black. They were given five cookies each, on neat little white china plates with tiny blue windmills on them, and milk in squat white mugs with windmills to match.

Skwisgaar lined his five in a row on the checkered blue-and-white tablecloth—four girl cookies and one boy cookie—and promptly snapped the heads off the girl-cookies. His friend had laughed and said something about him getting cooties in his mouth. Skwisgaar forced the charming smile that got him easy good grades and won over every adult he ever met. But then, after a moment's consideration, he bit the arms and legs off the boy-cookie and set the maimed gingerbread torso back on the plate. He declined the offered mug of milk and swallowed the mouthful dry.

Skwisgaar's mouth _was_ dry. He kept his eyes crunches shut, and wiped his pursed lips with the back of one trembling fist. He pushed himself upright and turned away from the toilet when he was sure there couldn't possibly be anything left in his stomach.

His legs shook almost violently when he rose from his crouch, and the sudden movement made his head swim and his vision cloud. Everything flushed dark, and bluish. He reeled and caught himself on the edge of a sink. For several more moments he was bent nearly double over the sink, gagging and heaving. The nosebleed he'd been ignoring had run down past his lips and down his chin. He saw a red splatter bloom in the white sink and heaved again, violently, and made a vicious swipe at the faucet tap. The water struck the white bowl with a resounding crackle, loud enough, he hoped, to drown out any other noises he might make.

He straightened up, flung his hair back, and leaned against a wall, trying to breathe. His nose and throat sang bright and angry with pain after every gasp. He couldn't stop shaking, and when he went to take a step, his legs folded underneath him.

Skwisgaar slumped into a heap on the floor, between the sink's pipes and a wall, his eyes flew to the door, panicked—before he abandoned all pretense and folded his hands over his face to cry.

After all, if anyone asked, he could always say he'd been high.

Back in Skwisgaar's empty white room, Toki sat on the immaculate slab of a bed, and waited.


End file.
